[Openicc] GoSoC 2011: CPD and Color Management

[Robert Krawitz]

On Wed, 4 May 2011 17:24:21 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
> I'm not immediately concerned whether the print settings are
> included in the profile or not. If it were possible to envision a
> day when al gutenprint driven printers, on Mac OS, Windows, Linux,
> could read these settings from the profile and know how to configure
> the print dialog correctly (either by choosing a print condition
> profile; or by choosing certain media types and settings which would
> then cause the correct profile to be automatically chosen) then this
> would be very good indeed. And it would make sharing profiles and
> settings much simpler if they were in a single file per print
> condition.

The advantage of having profiles include embedded print settings is
simply that it's harder for things to get lost, as it were.

> Now that immediately raises the issue of sharing ICC profiles, which
> all commercial products have varying license restrictions on how
> they get shared. There is common practice which probably will not
> really be punished under EULA's but in effect users are agreeing to
> ICC profile sharing behavior that is problematic with respect to
> those EULA's. In my view an ICC profile is not any different than a
> Word, Excel, TIFF or JPEG document. I'm not restricted in any way
> from sharing such files, although I am restricted from reverse
> engineering their transforms - baked into those files. There is a
> practical problem with a EULA that's as permissive as Microsoft's or
> Adobe's (or countless others) when it comes to the "output file"
> produced from an ICC profiling app, mostly because of the incentives
> surrounding the baked in transform needing to be protected. If it's
> not, one company (any company) could buy a copy of a profiling
> application and then start selling profiles for $5 each. This would
> cost Microsoft and Adobe very little, if any money, it might even
> make them money as people want to read the contents of these
> files. Whereas with the ICC profile, it's never a meaningful input
> file for the application that created it.

That's flatly not acceptable: there needs to be a way to create
profiles for Gutenprint that are unencumbered, or at worst (or perhaps
best, given the point about being able to sell profiles), licensed
GPLv2+, which most definitely allows reverse engineering the
transforms.  Otherwise we (Gutenprint) will not be able to distribute
profiles for our own package ourselves, and either users will have to
find their own profiles, or distributors will have to cut deals with
different outfits that lead to different output on different OS
distributions with the same Gutenprint version.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton